


chaotic

by rosecake



Category: Ant-Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/F, Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, Minor Violence, Phasing, Post-Endgame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2020-05-30 19:02:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19409458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosecake/pseuds/rosecake
Summary: Ghost joins up with the Avengers. Wanda has reservations, but she needs all the help she can get.





	chaotic

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VampirePaladin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VampirePaladin/gifts).



“This is Ava,” said Scott. “We also call her Ghost sometimes. You know, when we’re trying to stick to the whole secret identity thing.”

He and Hope were standing to either side of the woman, who looked like she wanted to shrink back in on herself. She was wearing a grey sweater that looked a few sizes too big for her, with the sleeves tugged down so far that only the tips of her fingers were showing. She didn't look very big - she wasn't quite as tall as Hope, although maybe that was only because Hope was standing up straight and Ava was curved forward, her shoulders hunched together.

“We think she’d make a good addition to the team,” said Hope. Her hand was on Ava’s back, and she seemed to be gently trying to push her forward.

“Hi,” said Ava. Hope nudged her again, and she lifted her hand in a timid wave.

Wanda’s first thought was that Ava looked harmless. But Wanda also knew that she didn’t look all that imposing herself. She knew better than to judge based solely on appearances.

“It’s nice to meet you,” she said, holding her hand out, and after a moment of hesitation Ava took it.

She felt the distortion before Ava’s hand actually met hers. The static of it slid right through her own energy fields in a way that was unfamiliar to her. Unfamiliar and deeply unnerving, enough that Wanda nearly yanked her hand back in surprise. She managed to control the reaction, though, and tried for what she hoped was a reassuring smile. Ava smiled back, her expression still a little nervous. And now that Wanda was looking, _really_ looking, she could see the energy crackling around Ava in flickering, discordant waves.

The normal order of reality was distorted around her, twisting in on itself as if to match her warped posture.

 _What’s wrong with you?_ thought Wanda, but she knew better than to ask the question out loud.

She looked from Ava to Scott and Hope, who were both looking at her with encouraging expressions, and she wanted to tell them that they were both trying a little too hard. Not that it mattered. They needed all the help they could get, and she wasn’t about to turn anyone away just because they were a little unsettling. So many of the Avengers were dead, or insisting on retirement, or too tied up with fixing their broken communities to help with anything else. Wanda had died a wanted criminal and come back to find herself promoted to a leadership position, all her past sins happily forgotten. She didn’t think she was well-suited to it, but it wasn’t as if she had anything else to do. Defeating Thanos hadn't brought any of her family back. The Avengers, as changed and foreign as the group felt, were the closest thing she had to a community. She was going to do her best by them despite her misgivings.

And she couldn't do her best short-staffed. Ava seemed as good a place as any to start.

“Welcome to the Avengers,” she said. "We're glad to have you." 

***

Maria Hill sent her Ava’s file along with a note that it was likely incomplete. SHIELD had grown into a monster with many limbs over the years, like any intelligence agency, and the branch of it that had run Ava ragged wasn’t really the same SHIELD that Maria worked for. Most of her information had been cobbled together from data recovered after she and Fury had begun their purge of Hydra’s lingering influence, and there were too many holes in it for comfort. 

Fortunately, most of the information in the file was nothing new - Hope and Scott had already explained most of it, and they’d heard it directly from either Ava or Bill Foster. And Wanda trusted Scott more than she trusted SHIELD, when it came down to it.

Ava was a fighter, that much was clear. And that was why Wanda asked her to come to the training center.

“Let’s go ahead and give this a try,” said Wanda. She wanted to get a feel for how Ava moved before they had to fight together for real. “Nice and easy for now, okay?”

Ava nodded, pulling up the hood and mask of her suit, and once she was safely covered her whole bearing changed. The balance of her weight shifted forward, and all of a sudden her stance was solid, even aggressive. There was no trace of shyness or uncertainty left in her.

Wanda made a note of the change and then she moved forward, throwing the first punch. There was very little strength behind it - she just wanted to see how Ava would react.

She didn’t consider herself an expert fighter, not yet, but she’d been trained by experts. Steve and Natasha, mostly, and occasionally Clint, although he usually protested that he wasn’t much use without a bow and arrow. As much as she’d tried, a few months of training couldn’t compare to lifetimes of it, and they just hadn’t had that much time together before things went to hell. If she could beat any of them in combat it was only due to her powers. If they were stripped from her she’d be the weakest member of the team.

That didn’t stop her from trying to get better. And she had gotten better, even if fighting against Ava made that hard to remember.

To start with, it was strange fighting against someone who didn’t even bother trying to dodge half the time. Unsettling. A better fighter than Wanda would be able to compensate even in the thick of the fight - Ava had to be solid to hit, after all, and there was a window of opportunity there - but she wasn’t quite quick enough on her feet to adjust to the rhythm of it. She reached out, moving as fast as she could, but she only caught air as Ava ghosted again.

They went a few rounds and Wanda ended up on the floor every time, usually quicker than she’d like.

And every time she struck through Ava’s insubstantial form she could feel the same instability vibrating through her, right through skin and muscle to the bone. “Can people always feel you? When you’re passing through them?” asked Wanda. She wasn’t sure if it was an effect of Ava’s powers or some artifact of her own.

“Sometimes,” said Ava. It was the first time she’d spoken through the mask, instead of just nodding or gesturing, and her voice came through low and distorted. The mask didn’t seem like it had been designed with the thought that she might want to speak while wearing it. “It depends on how solid I am. Whether I’m fully out of phase or not.”

It had been over a minute since she’d last swung her arm through Ava’s afterimage, and she could still feel the instability vibrating through her. “Okay,” said Wanda. “Interesting.”

Ava moved towards her again, and given that blocking had been useless so far Wanda decided it was time to try seeing how Ava fought against someone with their own powers. She let energy arc out from her hands, softly. Not enough to hurt anyone, just hard enough to push them back.

At least, that’s how she’d meant it. The pulse of energy left Wanda’s hands, passed straight through Ava as she phased around it, and splashed harmlessly against the gym wall. And Ava collapsed to the ground.

“Ava?” asked Wanda, concerned as Ava curled in on herself, flickering wildly. Wanda blinked, as if it would fix her vision, but her vision wasn’t the problem. “Ava!” she said, running towards her. There was a pained moan from beneath the mask. Wanda was able to get the mask off, but when she tried to hold Ava’s shoulder her hand passed right through it. “Ava, what’s wrong?”

She could see Ava’s mouth trying to form words, but she couldn’t hear anything, could barely even make out her face through the swirling, flickering after-impression of her as she shifted. The distortion around her had gotten worse, like a kettle of water shifting from a steady simmer to a rolling boil. There was no structure to her at all, just chaos.

Wanda hesitated for a moment. Her powers weren’t built for order - levitation, shields, all those things that required control and not destruction, those things took energy and concentration. Chaos came much more naturally. It would only take a spark, and what little structure still held Ava together would collapse in on itself. The easiest thing in the world.

Ava still flickered on the ground, unable to speak. Wanda swallowed and centered herself, and then reached into the general area of her head, feeling gently for her mind.

She did it as delicately as possible. It was her own powers that had triggered this, and she wasn’t sure if using them again, even if in a different way, would make things worse. But Ava’s mind was just as difficult to grasp as her body, and Wanda found herself having to push harder to find the information she wanted.

So she pushed. She’d only just invited Ava into the Avengers, the last thing she wanted to do was accidentally kill her in her first week. And she didn’t think she had time to casually ring up the Van Dynes and ask if they knew what was going on.

The connection she was looking for came to her suddenly, in flashes of images, far less coherent than usual. But perhaps that was to be expected given the circumstances. She saw Janet’s hands slide along Ava’s temples, and felt the memory of warm relief across her own scalp. It was swiftly replaced by pain, and an aching need for something, Wanda just needed to figure out what— a mint tin?

She could see it clearly, and knew that Ava kept it with her. Wanda went for Ava’s bag and upended it over the bench, and the tin she was looking for clattered against the wood along with all of Ava’s other personal belongings. A flash of guilt for how careless she was being in her panic overcame her, but she had other priorities. She grabbed the tin she'd seen in Ava's mind, and when she popped it open she found several glass vials nestled against each other. The contents glowed softly, swirling slowly as Wanda gently picked one up. She was familiar enough with Pym tech that she recognized it, although it didn’t look like the same Pym particles they’d used for time travel. This was something new to her.

Not new to Ava, though. She went back to her, and Ava reached out for her with a shifting, ghost-like hand. “How does it work?” asked Wanda.

There was no coherent answer - Ava’s face was screwed up with pain, and she wasn’t making a sound that Wanda could hear. Not having any better idea, Wanda unlatched the top of the vial and dumped the contents over Ava’s flickering body.

Ava sighed, a deep, shuddering intake of breath that Wanda could finally hear. She reached out for the tin of vials and Wanda held it out hesitantly, not wanting to drop it. But Ava’s hand was solid when she placed the tin in it.

“Sorry,” said Ava, her voice ragged. She opened a second vial and poured the contents into her hand, letting it absorb the particles. “It’s a little unpredictable, how it works.”

“No, I’m sorry. I didn’t expect that to happen.” Although, in retrospect, Wanda should have known better. Her power always had a chaotic center to it, and nothing about Ava was particularly stable to begin with.

“It’s fine,” said Ava. She reached for her mask, and for a second Wanda thought she was going to put it on and disappear back into being Ghost. In the end she left it off, though. She stretched out her fingers and then ran them along her jaw, as if to make sure her face was still solid. “That’s enough for today, right?”

“Right,” said Wanda. She watched as Ava got up, got her things together and left. It wasn’t until she was alone that she realized she was shaking.

***

If Ava bore Wanda any ill-will about the accident she didn’t let it show. She brought Wanda and the rest of the Avengers all sorts of information without any complaint. Hank and Janet had updated her suit, but it hardly seemed like she needed it. Her powers were practically tailor-fit to suit a spy, after all.

“Here you go,” said Ava, handing over a laptop.

Wanda suspected they were going to find all sorts of evidence of illegal human experimentation on it. “Thank you,” she said. There were deep circles under Ava’s eyes, and her hands twisted around each other as she stood there. She looked tired. Tired and a little out of place, and Wanda wanted to fix that, but she wasn’t sure how to go about it. It should be Steve in her place, or Clint or Natasha. Any of them would have handled Ava better. “Once we’ve gotten all the evidence together, do you want to be on the team that takes them down?”

She’d meant it as a kindness, as an offer to make Ava feel included, a little more involved. They sent her off on so many missions by herself, and that was the opposite of what Scott and the others had hoped for when they’d brought her to Wanda. But Ava didn’t seem to like the suggestion much. She ran her fingers through her hair, worrying it into knots.

“No,” she said. “I mean, no thank you, not if you don’t think you need me.”

“You don’t have to,” said Wanda. “I just— If we’re asking too much of you, you’ll tell me, right?”

The world wasn’t currently ending. There were always people who needed to be stopped, but she didn’t need to work people to the bone to do it. She didn’t feel she had the right.

“I’m fine,” said Ava. “I don’t mind the spying, the stealing. That part of it is easy. I just don’t…”

She trailed off, but Wanda had been in her head just long enough to get glimpses of things. And the reports she had on Ava’s past could fill in the holes. Ava’d left a trail of bodies behind her in her time with SHIELD. Some of the corpses she’d left looked peaceful - a slightly too solid fist through the brain seemed like a fast way to die - but many of them had been horribly twisted up, faces contorted in pain after having their nervous systems disrupted by Ava’s disequilibrium.

“We don’t need you to attack anyone,” said Wanda. Not at the moment, at least. But who knew what the future held? “It’s been incredibly helpful getting the evidence we need without having to wage a small war for it. Keeps the collateral damage to a minimum.”

Ava nodded. She stood to leave, and for a moment Wanda almost asked her to stay.

Ava was still so painfully reserved around her, and there was no need for her to just come and go once her missions were complete. Then again, as tightly reserved as Ava seemed, she still had Bill and Hope and Scott and Janet and Hank to go back to. She didn’t need to hang around the Avengers compound. She had her own family.

Just because Wanda was lonely didn’t mean everyone else was. So she let Ava go with a smile and a thank you.

***

Ava worked beautifully as a scout right up until she didn’t. Anything the Avengers came up with, anything SHIELD came up with, the enemy eventually found a way around. The underworld was bound to figure out how they were being robbed, and was bound to figure out a way to stop it. Wanda should have been better prepared for it.

Instead she was asleep when she got the emergency ping on her comm.

There was no response when she called Ava back, and she got dressed and got moving with her heart in her throat. Ava had been infiltrating a compound in Arizona, an hour out even with all the power Wanda had at her disposal, and she resented ever second of the wasted time. It took even longer skulking around the edges of the compound, trying not to alert anyone to her presence while looking for Ava. She didn’t want to start a fight until she’d found her, until she knew what she was dealing with.

She finally found her tucked between a few desert rocks, flickering wildly, just like she had been that day in the gym. Wanda reached for her and wasn’t surprised when her hands went right through her.

“What happened?” she asked.

It took Ava a few tries to make herself heard, to get her lungs and her vocal cords both solid enough at the same time. “I don’t know,” she said. “Some kind of energy field.”

Wanda looked out, towards the compound. It was buried underground, and all she could see with her eyes was the flat desert surface spread out in front of her, broken up with jagged rock cropping out into the sky. She could feel the energy of the compound underneath, though, a vague impression on her senses. And she could see the distortion field around it. Ava had probably slipped right past it, and in the process she’d had that hard earned stability stripped from her.

“Do you have any particles with you?” she asked, and Ava gestured to a few empty vials on the ground near her. They hadn’t worked, or the distortion had been so bad that they hadn’t been enough.

Wanda reached for her comm, and found that the signal was jammed. She could send out an emergency ping, but actually calling Janet or Hank was out of the question.

A distortion field and a signal dampener, and probably more than that as well. They were hiding something big in the Arizona desert, but they had time to figure that out later. Right now her priority was Ava.

“Ava?” she asked. There was no response. “Ava? Can you hear me?”

Ava looked up at her, but her eyes rolled back in her head, the after-images of her movements layering over each other and making it difficult to read her expression.

Wanda couldn’t carry Ava with her. She wasn’t substantial enough to be moved. Wanda could leave and come back, but she had no way of knowing if Ava would still be alive by the time she returned. She wasn’t even sure if there was any help she’d managed to find - she’d tried the particles and she was still a mess. Everything about her was a chaotic hive of energy, molecules moving too fast and erratic for this reality. She was only half there. Maybe less than half there, really.

The energy was clear enough that she could still see it with her eyes closed, like little starbursts underneath her lids. She could see her power interacting with it, could see just how easy it would be to make it worse. Everything in the universe had a tendency towards chaos even under the best of circumstances, and that was where the true strength of her powers came from. Just one little push, and Wanda could set off a chain reaction in the quantum fields holding Ava together, like sending a star supernova. Wanda wasn’t entirely sure what exactly that would mean for Ava, but it wouldn’t be good. She wouldn’t be anything recognizably human afterwards.

The energy fields around Ava were shifting anyway, spiraling out, looking for that freedom chaos promised, and she reached out to force them to hold their place.

Wanda's powers were not well-suited to healing. To any kind of reconstruction, really. It took all the delicacy and concentration she could muster, but still she managed to find the pathway all those runaway molecules belonged to. To force them, gently but firmly, back into their natural patterns.

She lost track of time, and when the touch of her Ava’s hand against her shoulder broke her concentration she realized the sun was beginning to rise.

“Let's get out of here,” she said, helping Ava stand.

“How did you do that?” asked Ava. She was looking at her hands, whole and solid, and there was a normal weight to her grasp as she reached for Wanda’s hand. A normal pressure in her fingers as she wrapped them around Wanda’s.

“It’s hard to explain,” said Wanda. She reached out to push a few strands of Ava’s hair back from her face, and was relieved when they moved at her touch. “We can talk about it once we’re home.”

***

Ava curved to her touch, her smile easy and open as Wanda drew her fingers along her temples. She sighed, and then reached up to pull Wanda’s hands away. “That’s enough.”

Wanda paused, her hands still raised. “Is it?” she asked. The quantum disequilibrium was still there, still flickering around her like a bulb on the verge of going out. Wanda wasn’t sure if Ava’s energy fields could ever be truly brought back to normal, to the same kind of steady state everyone else had, but with time she was sure she could get her closer. “I can go further.”

Ava shook her head. “It’s a balancing act,” she said, smiling wistfully. “Too unstable and I risk coming undone. Too stable and I can’t phase properly until it’s worn off some.”

She was still holding onto Wanda, hands loosely wrapped around Wanda’s wrists, and Wanda realized that she didn’t really want her to let go.

“You don’t need to be able to phase,” said Wanda. “Wouldn’t it be better to stay as stable as possible? Your life wouldn’t be nearly as risky if you weren’t stuck in between so often.”

“I wouldn’t make a very good spy if I couldn’t phase.”

Wanda pulled her closer, so that Ava’s hands were resting in her lap. “You don’t have to do spy for us,” she said. It would be a loss, certainly, but Wanda wasn’t SHIELD. She wasn’t Hydra. She wasn’t going to force Ava do anything. “There’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to live normally.”

“Oh, there’s every reason I shouldn’t,” said Ava. She was looking down at her own hands, her hair spilling over her shoulders and obscuring part of her face. “I hurt so many people,” she said. “I need to make up for it.”

“There are a lot of people in this organization who have done far worse than you,” said Wanda. “Myself included.”

Ava looked up at her then, and her gaze was striking. She really did have beautiful eyes. It was a shame she spent so much time covered by a mask. “Yes,” she said. “And now all of you are here, making up for it.”

Wanda wanted to tell her that it wasn’t necessary. That she didn’t have to be here, that putting herself through it wasn’t going to undo anything in her past. That she didn’t need to undo anything from her past. She could retire, live out the rest of her days with Bill in his labs, and Wanda wouldn’t blame her for it. But it wasn’t as if Wanda would have cared if anyone had told her the same thing. Ava was going to have to make peace with herself on her own terms.

Ava slid her fingers between Wanda’s, and still Wanda wasn’t expecting it when she leaned forward to kiss the corner of her mouth.

“You don’t have to—“ said Wanda, her face flushed with surprise, stumbling as she tried to get her thoughts in order. “I mean— I’ll help you regardless, you know that, right?”

Ava nodded. “I know,” she said. “You’re a kind person. That’s why I like you.”

Wanda didn’t consider herself a kind person at all. She’d helped Ava because she’d used her, she’d been the one to put her in the position to be hurt in the first place. She’d done it because it was the right thing to do. And, well, because something about Ava had made her want to try.

Ava kissed her again, fully this time, and Wanda felt the urge to argue slip away. She didn’t want to say anything.

She didn’t want Ava to stop kissing her.


End file.
